Patent application Ser. No. 14/457,821, entitled “A Fluxing Method to Reverse the Adverse Effects of Aluminum Impurities in Nickel-Based Glass-Forming Alloys”, filed on Aug. 12, 2014, is directed to a method of fluxing the melt of aluminum-contaminated Ni-metalloid glasses to reverse the adverse effects of aluminum impurities on glass-forming ability and toughness. That provisional patent considers nickel-based glass forming alloys with aluminum weight concentrations in excess of those associated with a high-purity state (i.e. greater than 10 ppm) whose glass-forming ability has been degraded due to the presence of the aluminum impurity, and demonstrates that by processing those alloys by the fluxing method disclosed therein, the glass-forming ability increases to a value associated with the high-purity state. However, patent application Ser. No. 14/457,821 does not address nickel-based glass-forming alloys whose glass-forming ability is degraded even in their high purity unfluxed state, and could potentially be improved by fluxing.
Patent application Ser. No. 14/029,719, entitled “Bulk Nickel-Silicon-Boron Glasses Bearing Chromium”, filed on Sep. 17, 2013, discloses that Ni—Cr—Si—B alloys may have improved glass forming ability (GFA) by fluxing with B2O3 (for example, see FIG. 1 and Table 1). This application demonstrates that Ni-based alloys bearing Cr, but free of P may have critical rod diameters improve by more than 50% when the atomic concentration of Cr is below 7 percent.